Wednesday, 27 December 2017

The Great Ontario House Cleaning

Ontarians face two major elections in 2018 — on June 7 to elect
a new provincial government and on Oct. 22 to elect municipal councils
across the province. What voters are going to have to decide is, do we want more of the same? Some useful questions to ask are: Are you better off now than you were four years ago? Are you happy with the progress being made on major issues such as public transit? Do the politicians who represent you spend their time working on things you care about, or they care about? Our
view is that after almost 15 years in power, Ontario’s Liberal
government is a spent, politically corrupt force that has left the
province’s finances in chaos. It’s so bad two independent,
non-partisan officers of the legislature — the auditor general and
Financial Accountability Office — say the books can’t be trusted. That
the government of Premier Kathleen Wynne is running a
multibillion-dollar deficit, despite claims of a balanced budget. Wynne’s
solution to massive hydro bills, created in large part by the Liberals’
bungling of the electricity file, is to kick the problem down the road.
Which will result in Ontarians paying billions of dollars more than
necessary on their electricity bills over the long term, according to
auditor general Bonnie Lysyk. We know Wynne’s re-election strategy. Keep her allies in the big public sector unions happy with generous, already signed, labour contracts. Spend
millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money on politically partisan
government advertising that would not have been allowed, according to
Lysyk, under a law Wynne scrapped. Accuse Progressive Conservative
Leader Patrick Brown of being a right-wing ideologue (ridiculous given
Brown’s election platform) while warning a vote for the NDP’s Andrea
Horwath is a vote for Brown. Municipally, the issue isn’t just who will win the mayors’ races, but what kind of councils will they have?

Even more than in provincial elections, the rules for running municipally massively favour incumbents. So without a major voter revolt, doing nothing will mean accepting the status quo. Doing nothing hasn't worked! We need politicians who care about what voters care about: Good public services delivered as efficiently as possible. But we won’t get it without a major political housecleaning in 2018.